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A comment on Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-V Cores a Year. Parent comment

Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by sjburt on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @05:37PM (#15802550)
It doesn't seem so. I think they're just switching the internal processors that do LBA translation, error correction, bad-block marking etc over to RISC. And then their marketing department took that decision and ran with it in a completely different direction.

The key line is "... transitioning its own consumption of processors – over one billion cores per year – to RISC-V."

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Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by joezydeco on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @05:43PM (#15802601)
...which is a message to investors meaning "we're dropping the cost of our product without dropping prices".

If that ARM license is half a dollar, a billion devices per year is a lot of profit.

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Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by Moto7451 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:31PM (#15803688)
Your point still stands, but it’s probaably less than fifty cents unless they’re building something really high end.

Oldie but goodie: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...

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Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by WillPostForFood on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @06:16PM (#15802906)
It would be surprising if prices didn't continue to drop.
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Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by nimish on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @05:46PM (#15802635)
Far more likely is that the SSD controllers that WD-SanDisk will create (that are the value-add difference between commodity NAND and good SSDs) will now use RISC-V cores. Samsung has a 5-core controller in its drives; I would guess that licensing costs are a pretty hefty chunk of the BOM for creating the controller
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Re:Western Digital Plans to Ship More Than One Billion RISC-... by phkahler on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:38PM (#15803721)
>> Samsung has a 5-core controller in its drives

Samsung is developing their own RISC-V cores too...

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